Archive for the ‘Child Sex Trafficking’ Category

Editor’s Note: Somaly Mam is a global leader who has pioneered the movement against modern slavery for nearly two decades. She has been recognized as a CNN hero, Glamour Magazine’s Woman of the Year, and one of Time Magazine’s most influential people. Through her work as a tireless advocate and human rights leader, Somaly Mam has made it her life’s mission to eradicate slavery and empower its survivors as part of the solution. This article is part of a series of op-eds from key speakers and delegates participating in this year’s Social Innovation Summit, which takes place on November 19th and 20th at Stanford Business School. View the full series here.

As a survivor of sex slavery, I have dedicated my life’s work to ending it. To many people, the issue of slavery seems like a clear case of right and wrong. The reality is much more complicated. There are many root causes and serious challenges. But these challenges do not stop me from continuing to find solutions to eradicate slavery and empower its survivors as part of the solution.

A significant number of people believe that slavery ended in 1863, when in fact, modern slavery exists in every corner of the globe. Not just in remote parts of Southeast Asia, but in your hometown, in your backyard. In America, there are 60,000 men, women, and children enslaved at this very moment.

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To show how undisturbed child predators can act but also to show how easy it is to track them down the Dutch child rights organisation put herself in the shoes of a 10 year old Philippine girl.

Together with Avaaz.org, Terre des Hommes the Netherlands has created an online petition to pressure governments to adopt proactive investigation policies in order to protect children against webcam child sex tourism. The petition starts today and can be signed through Avaazor via youtube.com/sweetie.

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A local man and woman were arrested over the weekend in connection with alleged prostitution involving a 16-year-old girl.

Charged were Aileen M. Mays, 27, of Binder Basin Road in Glouster, and Fred W. Kittle, Sr., 69, of Rocky Point Road in Athens. A release on Athens County Sheriff Pat Kelly’s Facebook page alleges that Mays told officers that in exchange for drugs, she set up meetings between Kittle and the girl to have sex.

Kittle is a registered sex offender, having been convicted of attempted rape in 1996.

The 16-year-old girl has been placed in the custody of Athens County Children Services. At this time, reports don’t indicate where the girl is from.

According to the sheriff’s account, one of his investigators who works with caseworkers from Children Services got information last Monday that a girl was being prostituted for money and drugs.

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Child sex trafficking is a growing problem in Arizona – with at-risk youth being easy targets for pimps.

Experts who spoke at an educational event at Paradise Valley United Methodist Church on Monday night said a record number of children in foster care, combined with a flourishing drug market, has created a perfect storm in Arizona.

“It really needs to be a communitywide effort because it’s happening everywhere and everybody has a role in it,” said Savannah Sanders, a program assistant with the group Training and Resources United to Stop Trafficking or TRUST.

For Sanders, the issue is personal.

She said she was trafficked in Phoenix when she was 16 years old.

Sanders said she fell in with a pimp who took all her money and held her hostage for nine months.

Guddi was tricked into prostitution by a neighbour who promised her work in Mumbai to help feed her struggling family. Photograph: Hazel Thompson

It was pitch black as I stumbled through the labyrinth of the dark corridors of a large brothel house in Kamathipura, Mumbai’s notorious red-light district. I’d been told to hide my camera under my scarf, not to speak and not to make eye contact with anyone. With my hand I felt the filthy walls dripping with condensation from the intense heat.

Eventually, guided by my Indian fixer, I came to a dimly lit door at the end of a corridor. Like a prison guard, an ageing madam came to the front of the brothel and unlocked the large padlock with her set of keys. I was taken into the reception area of the brothel, the space where the customers are taken to select a girl. In the ceiling I could see a small, open trap door. When the madam had disappeared, I climbed up a wooden ladder and pushed through the small gap.

Suddenly I was face to face with a “box cage”. I knew what I was looking at. The prostitutes had told me of the caged rooms and boxes they had been held in for months, even years, when they were first taken and trafficked to the red-light district. The madams would keep the girls like slaves in the cages until they were “broken”, to the extent that they would not try to run away. The girls told me they never knew if it was night or day. They were only taken out to eat or to be given to a customer for sex. For years I had wanted to photograph these cages, to prove that these places actually exist.

“The pain you saw on the people and the darkness you saw related to human trafficking was incredible,” Anna said. “Seeing the full circle of where the girls come from and where they end up, and the dysfunction in the country will definitely stick with me for a long time.”

After visiting Thailand and being exposed to human sex trafficking first hand, Della and Anna decided to organize a CrossFit fundraiser in order to raise funds to rebuild a dilapidated barn in Thailand that will house more than 60 girls rescued from trafficking.

The Powells, certified CrossFit and Tactical Athlete trainers, are a mother and daughter team that leads Grace and Grit Fitness group that runs a CrossFit, a strength and conditioning fitness trend gaining popularity, out of Lutz.

When they visited Thailand for three weeks in August with Rescue1, an umbrella organization of Compassionate Hope, a Christian organization that performs global relief work, the Powells met girls rescued from human trafficking and toured their current living facilities.

Before their trip, Della had already formulated a way to help the girls rescued from human trafficking.

The Rescue Games, a CrossFit event, will be held Saturday at 8:30 a.m. in Seaplane Basin Park at Davis Island Parks. The Rescue Games is looking for sponsors, volunteers and CrossFit competitors.

For years it has been known that Toledo has been one of the top cities nationally for sex trafficking.

When 105 teens were rescued across the country from prostitution, it didn’t come as a surprise to some people in Northwest Ohio.

But, if the rescue was tough, the transition to a normal life is even tougher.”Some of these girls have been abused months, days, even years by family members or traffickers. And that’s something you don’t just overcome overnight,” says Jeff Wilbarger, founder of “the daughter project.”

Perrysburg based “The Daughter Project” was designed to provide a transitional home where young women rescued from trafficking can live in a safe place. Inside the house, are house mothers who act like moms to girls who sometimes have no one.

Gaining trust is often the first step to helping the girls. In addition to counseling, victims are home schooled and taught life skills.

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Like all the best advocates, they had the necessary points and stories to make it clear to me why demand had to be the driving advocacy objective.

First they shared with me the story of “Tami”:

Tami was kidnapped by a pimp, while walking home from school. He kept her captive for six months, raping, beating, and starving her. And selling her for sex with men every night. Tami thought she could escape her hell by telling the “Johns” that she was only a kid. And so every night, for six months, Tami told the men who purchased her, “I’m only 15. Can you please take me to a police station?” But not one buyer did. According to Tami, they ignored her pleas, forced her to perform sexual acts, and then returned her to the pimp because they had already “paid for her.”

And then there was the story of the girl who was burned to death. She had tried to run away from the control of her pimp/trafficker. To make an example of any girl who dares to escape, the pimp burned her alive on “the track” in front of the other girls under his control.

The girls said that as long as “Johns” could buy 14- and 15-year-olds without fear or consequence, more girls would be coerced into exploitation and trafficking — and tortured if they tried to escape.

U.S. lawmakers have introduced a bill to strengthen federal laws against child sex trafficking, a proposal that has broad bipartisan support and will be considered after members of Congress return from an August recess.

Earlier this week, the FBI announced the rescue of more than 100 sexually exploited children as a result of a nationwide sweep of sex traffickers. The FBI said the operation yielded 150 arrests, primarily of pimps — those who profit from the illegal enterprise.

Members of Congress say arresting and prosecuting pimps is not enough, that those who pay to have sex with children must also face federal penalties.

“We have a Trafficking Victims Protection Act that prosecutes the trafficker — the guy that brings those girls throughout the United States. But the consumer, the buyer, is not prosecuted on the federal level,” said Republican Congressman Ted Poe during a news conference at the Capitol.

The End Sex Trafficking Act of 2013 mandates that those who seek sex with children will be prosecuted under federal law, which comes into play when there is trafficking activity across more than one state.

Brittany Phillips knew what she was running away from when the man at Hy-Vee told her she was pretty enough to model, but couldn’t begin to imagine what she was getting into.

In the space of a couple of months in 2006, when Phillips was 14 and should have been a ninth-grader, an attempt to escape an abusive home became a descent into human trafficking. She was plucked out of the grocery store, pressed into the domestic service of a drug dealer and ultimately taken to Chicago and forced into prostitution.

Her ordeal is high on the minds of Iowa law enforcement officials today, who fear literally untold numbers of boys and girls have similarly fallen into what is called “The Life” — a circuit of anonymous, dehumanizing, coerced sex for money.

More than 4,000 Iowa youngsters, most of them female, leave home each year as runaways. Many return in a few hours or days. But some are preyed upon by human traffickers.